Neoclassic Art

Neoclassic art and architecture

Neoclassicism (sometimes rendered as Neo-Classicism or Neo-classicism)
is the name given to quite distinct movements in the visual arts,
literature, theatre, music, and architecture. These movements were in
effect at various times between the 18th and the 20th centuries. What
could these "neoclassicisms" have in common?

What any "neo"-classicism depends on most fundamentally is a
consensus about a body of work that has achieved canonic status
(illustration, below). These are the "classics." Ideally— and
neoclassicism is essentially an art of an ideal— an artist,
well-schooled and comfortably familiar with the canon, does not repeat it
in lifeless reproductions, but synthesizes the tradition anew in each
work. This sets a high standard, clearly; but though a neoclassical artist
who fails to achieve it may create works that are inane, vacuous or even
mediocre, gaffes of taste and failures of craftsmanship are not commonly
neoclassical failings. Novelty, improvisation, self-expression, and
blinding inspiration are not neoclassical virtues; neoclassicism exhibits
perfect control of an idiom. It does not recreate art forms from the
ground up with each new project, as modernism demanded. "Make it
new" was the modernist credo of the poet Ezra Pound.

Speaking and thinking in English, "neoclassicism" in each art
implies a particular canon of "classic" models. We recognize
them, even if we struggle against their power: Virgil, Raphael, Nicolas
Poussin, Haydn. Other cultures have other canons of classics, however, and
a recurring strain of neoclassicism appears to be a natural expression of
a culture at a certain moment in its career, a culture that is highly
self-aware, that is also confident of its own high mainstream tradition,
but at the same time feels the need to regain something that has slipped
away: Apollonius of Rhodes is a neoclassic writer; Ming ceramics pay
homage to Sung celadon porcelains; Italian 15th century humanists learn to
write a "Roman" hand we call italic (a.k.a. Carolingian);
Neo-Babylonian culture is a neoclassical revival, and in Persia the
"classic" religion of Zoroaster, Zoroastrianism, is revived
after centuries, to "re-Persianize" a culture that had fallen
away from its own classic Achaemenean past. Within the direct Western
tradition, the earliest movement motivated by a neoclassicial inspiration
is a Roman style that was first distinguished by the German art historian
Friedrich Hauser (Die Neuattische Reliefs Stuttgart 1889), who identified
the style-category he called "Neo-Attic" among sculpture
produced in later Hellenistic circles during the last century or so BCE
and in Imperial Rome; the corpus that Hauser called "Neo-Attic"
consists of bas reliefs molded on decorative vessels and plaques,
employing a figural and drapery style that looked for its canon of
"classic" models to late 5th and early 4th century Athens and
Attica.

Neoclassic in architecture and the visual arts

In the visual arts the European movement called
"neoclassicism" began after ca 1765, as a reaction against both
the surviving Baroque and Rococo styles, and as a desire to return to the
perceived "purity" of the arts of Rome, the more vague
perception ("ideal") of Ancient Greek arts (where almost no
western artist had actually been) and, to a lesser extent, 16th century
Renaissance Classicism.

Each "neo"- classicism selects some models among the range of
possible classics that are available to it, and ignores others. The
neoclassical writers and talkers, patrons and collectors, artists and
sculptors of 1765 - 1830 paid homage to an idea of the generation of
Pheidias, but the sculpture examples they actually embraced were more
likely to be Roman copies of Hellenistic sculptures. They ignored both
Archaic Greek art and the works of Late Antiquity. The Rococo art of
ancient Palmyra came as a revelation, through engravings in Wood's The
Ruins of Palmyra. Even in all-but-unvisited Greece, a rough backwater of
the Ottoman Empire, dangerous to explore, neoclassicists' appreciation of
Greek architecture was mediated through drawings and engravings, which
subtly smoothed and regularized, "corrected' and "restored"
the monuments of Greece, not always consciously. As for painting, Greek
painting was utterly lost: neoclassicist painters imaginatively revived
it, partly through bas-relief friezes, mosaics, and pottery painting and
partly through the examples of painting and decoration of the High
Renaissance of Raphael's generation, frescos in Nero's Domus Aurea,
Pompeii and Herculaneum and through renewed admiration of Nicholas Poussin.
Much "neoclassical" painting is more classicisizing in subject
matter than in anything else.

There is an anti-Rococo strain that can be detected in some European
architecture of the earlier 18th century, most vividly represented in the
Palladian architecture of Georgian Britain and Ireland, but also
recognizable in a classicizing vein of architecture in Berlin. It is a
robust architecture of self-restraint, academically selective now of
"the best" Roman models.

Neoclassicism first gained influence in England and France, through a
generation of French art students trained in Rome and influenced by the
writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and it was quickly adopted by
progressive circles in Sweden. At first, classicizing decor was grafted
onto familiar European forms, as in the interiors for Catherine II's lover
Count Orlov, designed by an Italian architect with a team of Italian
stuccadori: only the isolated oval medallions like cameos and the
bas-relief overdoors hint of neoclassicism; the furnishings are fully
Italian Rococo (illustration, left).

But a second neoclassic wave, more severe, more studied (through the
medium of engravings) and more consciously archaeological, is associated
with the height of the Napoleonic Empire. In France, the first phase of
neoclassicism is expressed in the "Louis XVI style", the second
phase in the styles we call "Directoire" or "Empire."
Italy clung to Rococo until the Napoleonic regimes brought the new
archeaological classicism, which was embraced as a political statement by
young, progressive, urban Italians with republican leanings.

The high tide of neoclassicism in painting is exemplified in early
paintings by Jacques-Louis David (illustration, right) and Jean Auguste
Dominique Ingres' entire career. David's Oath of the Horatii was painted
in Rome and made a splash at the Paris Salon of 1784. Its central
perspective is perpendicular to the picture plane, made more emphatic by
the dim arcade behind, against which the heroic figures are disposed as in
a frieze, with a hint of the artificial lighting and staging of opera, and
the classical coloring of Nicholas Poussin.

In sculpture, the most familiar representatives are the Italian Antonio
Canova, the Englishman John Flaxman and the Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen.

In the decorative arts, neoclassicism is exemplified in Empire
furniture made in Paris, London, New York, Berlin; in Biedermeyer
furniture made in Austria; in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's museums in Berlin,
Sir John Soane's Bank of England in London and the newly built
"capitol" in Washington, DC; and in Wedgwood's bas reliefs and
"black basaltes" vases. The Scots architect Charles Cameron
created palatial Italianate interiors for the German-born Catherine II the
Great in Russian St. Petersburg: the style was international. Indoors,
neoclassicism made a discovery of the genuine classic interior, inspired
by the rediscoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which had started in the
late 1740s, but only achieved a wide audience in the 1760s, with the first
luxurious volumes of tightly-controlled distribution of Le Antichità di
Ercolano. The antiquities of Herculaneum showed that even the most
classicizing interiors of the Baroque, or the most "Roman" rooms
of William Kent were based on basilica and temple exterior architecture,
turned outside in: pedimented window frames turned into gilded mirrors,
fireplaces topped with temple fronts, now all looking quite bombastic and
absurd. The new interiors sought to recreate an authentically Roman and
genuinely interior vocabulary, employing flatter, lighter motifs, sculpted
in low frieze-like relief or painted in monotones en camaïeu ("like
cameos"), isolated medallions or vases or busts or bucrania or other
motifs, suspended on swags of laurel or ribbon, with slender arabesques
against backgrounds, perhaps, of "Pompeiian red" or pale tints,
or stone colors. The style in France was initially a Parisian style, the
"goût Grèc" not a court style. Only when the plump, young king
acceded to the throne in 1771 did his fashion-loving Queen bring the
"Louis XVI" style to court.

From about 1800 a fresh influx of Greek architectural examples, seen
through the medium of etchings and engravings, gave a new impetus to
neoclassicism that is called the Greek Revival.

Neoclassicism continued to be a major force in academic art through the
19th century and beyond— a constant antithesis to Romanticism or Gothic
revivals— although from the late 19th century on it had often been
considered anti-modern, or even reactionary, in influential critical
circles. By the mid-19th century, several European cities - notably St
Petersburg and Munich - were transformed into veritable museums of
Neoclassical architecture.

In American architecture, neoclassicism was one expression of the
American Renaissance movement, ca 1890-1917; its last manifestation was in
Beaux-Arts architecture, and its very last, large public projects were the
Lincoln Memorial (highly criticised at the time), the National Gallery in
Washington, D.C., and the American Museum of Natural History's Roosevelt
Memorial. These were white elephants as they were built. In the British
Raj, Sir Edwin Lutyens' monumental city planning for New Delhi marks the
glorious sunset of neoclassicism. Soon World War II destroyed all
illusions.

Neoclassical architecture

Neoclassical architecture as a movement began in the 18th century, as a
reaction against both the surviving Baroque and Rococo styles, and as a
desire to return to the perceived "purity" of the arts of Rome,
the more vague perception ("ideal") of Ancient Greek arts (where
almost no western artist had actually been) and, to a lesser extent, 16th
century Renaissance Classicism.

There is an anti-Rococo strain that can be detected in some European
architecture of the earlier 18th century, most vividly represented in the
Palladian architecture of Georgian Britain and Ireland, but also
recognizable in a classicizing vein of Late Baroque architecture in Paris
(Perrault's east range of the Louvre), in Berlin, and even in Rome, in
Alessandro Galilei's facade for S. Giovanni in Laterano. It is a robust
architecture of self-restraint, academically selective now of "the
best" Roman models.

Neoclassicism first gained influence in England and France, through a
generation of French art students trained at the French Academy in Rome
and influenced by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and it was
quickly adopted by progressive circles in Sweden. At first, classicizing
decor was grafted onto familiar European forms, as in Gatchina's interiors
for Catherine II's lover Count Orlov, designed by an Italian architect
with a team of Italian stuccadori (stucco workers).

A second neoclassic wave, more severe, more studied (through the medium
of engravings) and more consciously archaeological, is associated with the
height of the Napoleonic Empire. In France, the first phase of
neoclassicism is expressed in the "Louis XVI style", the second
phase in the styles we call "Directoire" or "Empire."
Italy clung to Rococo until the Napoleonic regimes brought the new
archeaological classicism, which was embraced as a political statement by
young, progressive, urban Italians with republican leanings.

The center of Polish classicism was Warsaw under the rule of the last
Polish king Stanisław August Poniatowski. The best known architects
and artists, who worked in Poland were Dominik Merlini, Jan Chrystian
Kamsetzer, Szymon Bogumił Zug, Jakub Kubicki, Antonio Corazzi, Efraim
Szreger, Christian Piotr Aigner, Wawrzyniec Gucewicz and Bertel
Thorvaldsen.

Neoclassical architecture was exemplified in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's
buildings, especially the Old Museum in Berlin, Sir John Soane's Bank of
England in London and the newly built "capitol" in Washington,
DC. The Scots architect Charles Cameron created palatial Italianate
interiors for the German-born Catherine II the Great in Russian St.
Petersburg: the style was international.

Indoors, neoclassicism made a discovery of the genuine classic
interior, inspired by the rediscoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which
had started in the late 1740s, but only achieved a wide audience in the
1760s, with the first luxurious volumes of tightly-controlled distribution
of Le Antichità di Ercolano. The antiquities of Herculaneum showed that
even the most classicizing interiors of the Baroque, or the most
"Roman" rooms of William Kent were based on basilica and temple
exterior architecture, turned outside in: pedimented window frames turned
into gilded mirrors, fireplaces topped with temple fronts, now all looking
quite bombastic and absurd. The new interiors sought to recreate an
authentically Roman and genuinely interior vocabulary, employing flatter,
lighter motifs, sculpted in low frieze-like relief or painted in monotones
en camaïeu ("like cameos"), isolated medallions or vases or
busts or bucrania or other motifs, suspended on swags of laurel or ribbon,
with slender arabesques against backgrounds, perhaps, of "Pompeiian
red" or pale tints, or stone colors. The style in France was
initially a Parisian style, the "goût Grèc" ("Greek
style") not a court style. Only when the young king acceded to the
throne in 1771 did Marie Antoinette, his fashion-loving Queen, bring the
"Louis XVI" style to court.

From about 1800 a fresh influx of Greek architectural examples, seen
through the medium of etchings and engravings, gave a new impetus to
neoclassicism that is called the Greek Revival.

Neoclassicism continued to be a major force in academic art through the
19th century and beyond— a constant antithesis to Romanticism or Gothic
revivals— although from the late 19th century on it had often been
considered anti-modern, or even reactionary, in influential critical
circles. By the mid-19th century, several European cities - notably St
Petersburg and Munich - were transformed into veritable museums of
Neoclassical architecture.

In American architecture, neoclassicism was one expression of the
American Renaissance movement, ca 1890-1917; its last manifestation was in
Beaux-Arts architecture, and its very last, large public projects were the
Lincoln Memorial (highly criticised at the time), the National Gallery in
Washington, D.C., and the American Museum of Natural History's Roosevelt
Memorial. These were white elephants as they were built. In the British
Raj, Sir Edwin Lutyens' monumental city planning for New Delhi marks the
glorious sunset of neoclassicism.